How to Be a Puppy at Work

The one and only, adorable B-dog

On an earlier post, I suggested to treat yourself like a puppy. I had given that as an assignment to a Founder/CEO client as well. She emailed me to ask that she was successfully doing it in her personal life and in social engagements but had difficulty bringing it to work.

How can we be puppy-like at work? Puppies don’t like to work (she says)

Well…I don’t think that’s true. Fetching dogs like to fetch. Try throwing something at a puppy from a fetching breed, what does he do?

Assuming you do something that you like as work — something that is in line with your strengths and interests- I’d say it’s possible to treat our work as play.

What if the word serious was taken away from your workday….what if the work was not “work” but your playtime …where you get to fetch stuff that you throw at yourself?

I’m not saying this should be your attitude towards work. I’m saying this is a cool perspective to experiment with. The proof is in the pudding. Try it and keep it if it works for you, discard if it doesn’t.

If you want to give it a try to be a puppy at work…

It may be helpful to do a short visualization before work where you activate the puppy state and then bring it to work. During visualization, you can either

image yourself like a puppy and activate the states of play, fun, openness, and curiosity

Or

pick memories where you felt you were in a puppy-like state…See what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt.

Also, let me share what I practice to activate a sense of play:

I tell myself “It’s playtime!” when I’m about the start work. I imagine it like a big Lego set I get to play with…Things to figure out..things to create…etc. I remind myself of all the toys in the world, I chose to play this one and now I get to play with it. What a blessing…

Give it a try, let me know how it goes.